Carceral Continuities and Abolitionist Politics: Narratives of Women in Confinement in India

The prison system and state-run sites for confining unruly populations have been variously considered within frameworks such as ordered institutions to places focused on rights, reform, and rehabilitation, and now, abolitionism. This progression is largely shaped by scholarship from the Global North. Meanwhile, the Global South has followed these trends in understanding carceral institutions, responding to calls for human rights, creating humane prisons, and now contemplating abolitionist practices. Weaving together narratives drawn from prison memoirs and diaries, as well as from my fieldwork experience in prisons and a safety home for young girls, I problematise this linear and emulative epistemic approach and examine ideas of freedom and confinement within a larger canvas of carceral continuities in the lives of women and young girls, particularly those with experiences in state-run sites of confinement in India. I unveil disruptions in the prevailing notions of discipline, control, and reform, that govern prisons and other state-run sites of confinement. Through this analysis, I attempt a grounded feminist unravelling of solidarities and alternative conceptions of resistance that emerge within these institutions of confinement. I demonstrate that a feminist reading of these narratives provides an opportunity for an alternate theorising of the prison and the effects of the carceral state on women's lives. Finally, I hope to engage in a reimagined discourse on the meanings of confinement and control, resistance and freedom, and the uniqueness of an abolitionist praxis.